


Cross-Currents

by inK_AddicTion



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Ableism, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Internalised ableism, Written for bellowdiamondweek on tumblr, mentions of White/Pink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-01 06:44:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11480865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inK_AddicTion/pseuds/inK_AddicTion
Summary: A series of sequential vignettes following Yellow and Blue’s relationship over time.





	1. Window/Ships

Two hundred years hadn’t sounded that long, before Blue Diamond had really had to think about it, before she had to confront it, staring her in the face. Only two centuries to be parted from Yellow Diamond for the first time to build their first ever solo colonies at not even a thousand years old, to take up the reins as the individual empresses they would have to be one day; only two centuries hadn’t sounded long at all when they’d found the planets, deceptively perfect for both of them save for the distance of half a galaxy between them.

One was a desert world, Kroag IV, buried in the Fractal System, hot and arid, waterless, crumbling crust fractured with volcanic activity that had churned up the precious materials Yellow needed for the wide scope of her building vision. The other, Opeth, at almost the other end of the galaxy in the Argent System, was icebound, quiet and secretive, the stirrings of life drifting under the skin of ice locked seas, a pantheon of stars in an unusually bright sky that Blue had fallen in love with the moment the first report had come back from the investigating team, a nearby cluster of moons ripe and ready for plucking. Even White Diamond had been supportive, eager to see her young apprentices leave the protective nest of Homeworld and make their own way.

Only two hundred years without the comfort of Yellow’s strong arms or her quick mind, able to unpick any problem, no matter how looming or torturous to Blue, in moments, her steadfast loyalty, her affection, only two hundred years without the only companion Blue had ever known, her peer, her equal, in a way to which White Diamond had always remained aloof. Only two hundred years without Yellow Diamond.

“I can’t,” Yellow whispered into Blue’s hair. She was holding Blue with the very tight caution of someone with something infinitely precious and fragile in her grasp, loving Blue the same way she always had ever since they’d met barely moments after their emergences. “Blue, I can’t. I thought I could but I don’t want to greet the days without you.”

“Unwillingness isn’t the same as incapability,” Blue murmured back, putting steel into her voice that she didn’t necessarily feel. “We’ll cope. Living with White for the rest of my life doesn’t entirely appeal to me.”

Yellow’s chest hiccupped with a reluctant laugh at the flat joke. She pressed Blue closer against her, the gentleness of those huge, deft hands against her fragile spine, held up more by the rigid structure of metal concealed under her dress than by her own feeble physical strength, utterly immeasurable. Yellow’s face nuzzled into Blue’s soft hair, breathing her in as if Blue was an intoxicant that she could never get enough of, an addiction that she would never slake, a need that she would never put aside. Blue’s arms were wrapped around Yellow’s shoulders, letting her take the weight of both of them, bathing in the total trust they shared. There was no one who knew her better, more intimately of her flaws and quirks than the one who had been splintered from a part of Blue’s own gem and shaped into Yellow Diamond.

“The ship’s waiting,” Blue finally said, reluctantly. Belying her words, she gripped Yellow tighter, marring her bare shoulders, dotted with blue freckles, with scratches. Yellow squeezed her.

“Let’s wait. I want just one more moment with you.” Yellow’s voice had gone rough and needy, her hands clenching hard around Blue’s body, like she could crush and fold Blue’s softness into Yellow’s hard muscular planes, like she could absorb and make her own all that separated them. Yellow’s gem did not glow, but her eyes did, dark and rich with intent, like whipped honey melted fever-hot. If Blue didn’t know that Yellow’s gem was incapable of inducing fusion, she would have suspected Yellow of just that.

“You’re being overdramatic, Yellow…” Blue hissed, breathless, trying to sound disapproving. Yellow’s eyes crinkled up at the corners, clearly amused by Blue’s utter failure to sound annoyed.

Blue’s gem flickered and pulsed with excitement. The memory of their fusion bubbled, hot and forbidden, dangerously addictive. They last formed Green Diamond in less than illustrious – and very secretive – circumstances, trapped in a now drained swamp on the colony planet Ceta that they had conquered together in White’s name, but it hardly seemed to matter where they were, what they were doing, who they were, Green surpassed all of it. Together, they were more than they could ever be apart. Their flaws fit together like puzzle pieces, like they were meant to gel together in the most flagrant and disgusting display. But of course, they weren’t. They were Diamond.

“Indulge me,” Yellow begged, young enough still that it sounded like an urgent request but not yet an order. It was something that White would have said – Yellow tried to sound like her, but her voice was always a little too earnest to pull off that cold ring of condescension that haunted Blue’s waking dreams and sleeping nightmares. “This once,” added Yellow, and ruined any similarity at all with the desperation not quite hidden in those two words.

Blue rolled her eyes, but tilted her head up and closed her eyes, waiting. Yellow kissed her, her warm breath skating over Blue’s cheek as she huffed a little, excitedly, the way she always did before their lips touched. Her hands massaged Blue’s back, rubbing over the prominent vertebrae, knuckling against Blue’s skinny hips where the support tubes wrapped down over Blue’s thighs, the exoskeleton Yellow had built herself. Blue kneaded Yellow’s shoulders and took control with deft expertise.

They kissed for some time, the wet sounds of their mouths and the near-silent exclamations of breath soft and self-contained in the antechamber of the docks. This was a practised dance they had made aplenty, laying together in their shared room on Homeworld where White wouldn’t find them, for hours, not silent but not talking either. It was not one that would overwhelm, not even now, on the cusp of two hundred years apart.

The kiss ended as all things had to. Blue rested her head on Yellow’s shoulder. Yellow was breathing quicker than she did, and always needed a moment longer to control herself. It was one of the things that Blue loved about her – she found it so difficult to conceal her feelings, she was overspilling with them, filled to the brim with passion and fury for life, always alive in the way that Blue, sluggish and lethargic, rarely understood. Yellow was going to a desert planet, a place that welcomed heat as its own. Blue hoped she would sustain that sharp spark in its vibrant sun while Blue was away.

In near silence, Blue voiced her most terrible fear, hiding her face because she knew it was silly. After all of White Diamond’s failed attempts to beat them into a shape that White recognised in the mirror, which Yellow had resisted, her stubbornness that of a file – she would break before she bent – it was silly to think that a meagre two hundred years apart would change her. Even so… Blue couldn’t shake the fear that she’d return and not recognise her.

“Don’t change when I’m gone, will you?”

 _Don’t leave me behind,_  she thought, instead. She struggled to keep up with Yellow’s shifting emotions and intense focus on the best of days, even living together in the same room, kept relevant by proximity, if by nothing else.

Yellow pulled back a little and tilted her head until Blue looked into her eyes, almost confused, a small indulgent smile playing around her mouth. She was Diamond. They could not change. She shook her head with a little laugh at Blue’s sentimentality, as ever, expressed over the useless and impossible.

“Of course I won’t,” Yellow said, fondly, as if Blue was being just a little ridiculous. Blue squeezed her tighter, for just a brief moment, trying her hardest to memorise the exact feeling of comfort and warmth and safety.

Neither of them could’ve known that she was lying, that this meeting would be the last truly pleasant, undisturbed one face to face for over ten thousand years.

“We have to go.” Blue’s eyes slid away, and after a moment, her body followed suit. They paused a moment, adjusting dresses and coats, sharing a final, unguarded look. And then Yellow straightened her spine and marched towards the door, pushing it open with one hand.

The two Diamonds emerged onto the docks to a throng of gems waiting to see them off. White Diamond hadn’t bothered to attend, but had sent her Diopside in her place, who waited, mechanical arm crossed over her burly normal one. She gave Yellow a grave nod and stared wordlessly at Blue, who ducked her head, trying not to catch her flat, whiteish-green eyes, the colour of rotting pond-murk. Yellow liked Diopside, but she terrified Blue. Diopside’s favourite stories had always been about how many weakling gems she had crushed in her single hand, and always with the implication that Blue would be next, if White Diamond should ever fancy that Blue would make a better necklace than subordinate.

Two ships had nosed into the port, awkwardly close together, bulky as yet. Years later, Yellow’s technology would revolutionise Homeworld, but for now, the ships were still ugly greyish squares, snub-nosed craft with wings and arched tails, each forehead containing a white diamond. An effort had been made to pattern the hulls with yellow and blue diamonds respectively, but the paint hadn’t stuck well to the protective cladding on the hull, and every time the ships shifted with little purrs of engine adjustment, yellow blue flakes drifted off like gem shards, like crinkly insect wings.

There was no sense in dragging out the parting any longer than they had to. Swallowing the grief that reached with bruiselike fingers from her heart to tighten around her throat, Blue lifted her chin and practised her best impression of White Diamond – unaffected, cold, divorced from emotion. Yellow was doing exactly the same thing, Blue could see it in the stern set of her shoulders, the way she was linking her arms behind her back, so her trembling hands couldn’t be seen.

Blue lost control of the illusion the moment she stepped up into the ship and heard the panel close laboriously behind her. A flood of coldness seemed to race over her as the ship’s door sealed shut, and she felt suddenly weak, cut off from her greatest strength. Her lip trembled rebelliously and her eyes stung. She wanted – oh, why couldn’t they to stay together, like they had before on Ceta? Two hundred years. Blue could barely breathe. At once, she felt younger and weaker than she had since the moment Yellow had created her exoskeleton for her.

“My Diamond?” her pearl, hovering at her ankle, murmured. She was a recent gift from Nacre, Mother of Pearl, powder-blue and soft-spoken, flatteringly unassuming. Her batch sister, gifted to Yellow, was the stark opposite, driving home how the others saw them – irreconcilably different, fundamentally incompatible. In two hundred years’ time, would Yellow still disagree with them? Would Blue?

Blue Diamond blinked, refocused, saw the captaining Nephrite waiting with a frozen, awkward expression and a stiff salute. For some reason, the proud blue diamond the nephrite wore over her breast was enough to sober her. She couldn’t afford to be emotional in public, she couldn’t afford to dwell on her feelings – she had to be a leader. Blue cleared her throat and did her best grave White-nod. The relieved captain dropped the salute, and Blue allowed herself to be ushered into the ship.

The captain ran through the formalities quickly, but Blue interrupted her before she had even had time to finish the basic pre-takeoff speech.

“I don’t care,” she stated, coldly, like White would have, “My quarters.”

“O-Of course, my Diamond.” The nephrite recovered admirably quickly, and scuttled back to the bridge.

Her pearl led the way through the ship, which consisted of one very large corridor big enough for a diamond to stride through, holed all over with smaller service corridors like a termite mound, and a bulbous ovular room like a giant egg at the end which doubled up as both the viewing station and the passenger’s lounge. At the moment, the massive, semi-spherical window looked back towards the port, and the grim, whiteish mass of the clustered gems waving them off.

Blue crossed to the side, craning her head to see the yellow-painted ship. Through the thick, reinforced material, Blue could just discern a yellowish shape standing in the opposite window, mirroring her position. Something lurched in her, and Blue pressed her hands against the rigid window, as if she could reach out through space and distance and touch Yellow’s face one last time, staring back through the window of the departing ship. How had she known?

Before they’d accepted the colony planets, White Diamond had told them that they had a duty to lead lesser gems, because they were made Diamonds, intrinsically stronger, more capable, less inhibited than other gems. They were the finest that gem kind had to offer, and as a result, they had a responsibility to usher that glorious vision that only they possessed into the lives of their subservient, obedient subjects. Blue believed her, nothing else had seemed to her as grand or important as a destiny to rule from creation, a flattering, ego-stroking view of herself mothering her gems into an age of beauty and grace, but Yellow had not. She had raged about White’s lies and her pompous manner and her smug, self-assuring view of the world, and Blue had found herself arguing back.  _What do you know about being a gem like us,_  she had shrieked,  _yours is useless!_

Yellow had gone quiet then, and sickly-pale. It was their worst argument to date, and of course they had apologised to each other, frantically quickly, because the advent of their separation was looming, and neither of them wanted to leave hating each other. But now Blue thought about it, thought about how she wouldn’t see Yellow until the two hundred years was over and the colony was finished, how desperately afraid she was that Yellow would leave her behind in the dust like they’d spoken of doing to White – full of the visions of youth. Blue had never been the creative one. She liked the comfort of rules and traditions, liked the sanctity of age. There was nothing Yellow hated more.

The ships jolted into take-off. Startled by the rude jerk, Blue’s pearl fell over, tearing Blue’s eyes from the ship’s window for just long enough for her to miss the yellow ship leave the port. When she looked back, her palm against the chilly window, she had squint to see the yellow blur in all of that blackness.

The duty they owed to their gems, their place in the world and what it meant to be Diamond had brought them to vicious arguments and standoffish silences before, and now, inexorably, it dragged them apart. Blue squeezed her eyes shut. Two hundred years. Only two hundred years. It wasn’t so long, she promised herself.

Not long at all.


	2. Moon/Colony

Yellow Diamond ruled at the touch of a button. The hive of activity that was her office, sunken deep into the sandblasted bedrock of the colony Kroag IV, was in full force, muted streams of conversation parting around the circle of focused silence in which Yellow worked. Only her Pearl was allowed to disrupt her when she was in the mood to turn every inch and ounce of her formidable concentration on her work to better the pre-existing systems of Homeworld, an innovative frenzy which her gems regarded with absolute pride.

There were not many of them yet, Yellow Diamond gems grown and made. Kroag IV was a barren and dead planet, suitable for dry jaspers and sandy jades, the occasional sphene, and the neighbouring asteroid belts that Yellow had begun colonising after three centuries developing Kroag were little better. But the fierce sun that had hampered gem production was an incredible boost to Yellow Diamond’s industrial vision, which had developed swiftly to harness solar energy to power her increasingly ambitious designs.

Yellow Diamond’s Kroagan gems spoke to their Diamond almost regularly, reporting on all aspects of their lives, difficulties, defects, and drawbacks, things that hindered, things that helped, and it was hard to believe that she wasn’t the most effective and rational leader of the Authority, even taking into account their own bias, when the next schematic that hit the factories was directly designed to target those obstacles that kept them from being the most efficient that they possibly could be.

They were proud to be yellow gems. She drove them hard, but no harder than she would herself. Unfortunately, that meant that any distractions had to take a permanent backseat.

“Yellow?” Blue Diamond’s voice over the screen was soft, but a little sad.

“Blue,” Yellow responded automatically, and then actually looked up, feeling a little guilty when a smile crept over Blue’s lips at the acknowledgement.

She looked tired, Yellow thought, with a sudden burst of protectiveness, there were shadows under her eyes, which were sunken into her skull, and her skin looked papery and bloodless. She had to be tired, juggling a new colony with her chronic lethargy. She was calling from somewhere isolated, Yellow could just make out the soft, near silent susurrus of waves lapping against a stone basin, and the darkness surrounding her face was shrouding and starless. Mysterious, like her, and as far from the obviously busy humdrum of industriousness straining at the seams of imposed order under the hot yellow brightness of lighting strips in Kroag’s core as it could be.

“What can I do for you, Blue?” Yellow asked, striving for the businesslike tone she cultivated among her gems. Despite her best efforts, a tenderness crept into her voice when she said Blue’s name. By the twitch of Blue’s full lips, she had noticed. Yellow’s cheeks burned, but she tilted her chin up haughtily, like White would have done.

“I just want to know when you’re next planning a rest cycle. Perhaps an extended one?” Blue murmured, keeping her voice deliberately pitched low so that Yellow had to lean forward to hear her, suppressing a flicker of irritation as she did so.

Yellow’s brain scrambled for her schedule, trying to recall when she had next allotted a moment of weakness for herself. She knew that to work at optimum efficiency, a gem required certain amounts of rest, but Yellow barely felt the strains of exhaustion – she had never been as weak as Blue, whose physical strength was meagre and power reserves smaller still. She hesitated for a moment too long, and Blue’s sigh of disappointment rushed through the com.

“Oh, Yellow.” There was just a hint too much of fondness there that Yellow abruptly found patronising.

“I’m busy,” Yellow said defensively, her hackles rising. “I’ve been developing the Kroag belts, and the Zaria moon colony-“

“Zaria?” Blue interrupted, and abruptly a sharp change came over her face. Her lips thinned and her eyebrows twitched up, eyes narrowing coldly. It was a sneer as natural to her face as the smile she reserved for Yellow alone, and it always surfaced with the mention of White Diamond. “But that’s White’s.”

“Not anymore,” said Yellow, torn between discomfort and smugness at revealing this to Blue, proof positive of White’s approval with her work – approval that evidently had not been given to Blue. For so long, Blue had been the uncontested favourite, Blue, who sang and danced and understood music the way gems were supposed to, if they weren’t as off-colour as Yellow. It was a nasty, petty feeling, but Yellow felt a certain cruel glee, and echoes of the stupefied awe she’d felt herself when White had told her. “White transferred control to me. It’s mine now.”

“When?” Blue demanded.

“A few turns ago,” Yellow said vaguely, though she remembered the exact date. She remembered everything.

White had turned up in a visit as unannounced as she ever got, ordering a tour of Kroag’s burgeoning facilities. Yellow had been frantic, ill at ease, and probably rambling, trying to hurry White through corridors that were naturally messy with the chaos of contained brilliance that defined areas under Yellow’s direct control. White Diamond, with her pristine cape and scent of clear, cold winds threatening snow, was as alien as it was possible to be to the close, smoky corridors carved into Kroag’s core.

She had pronounced Yellow’s work as  _“thoroughly satisfactory”._ Yellow remembered every twitch of contained surprise on White’s usually impassive face almost obsessively. White had even seemed charmed – well, as charmed as White ever was – by Yellow’s “technical twiddles”, as White had desultorily referred to them, to ease access for her gems. They’d come across one of her jaspers, who was using the extendable screens with the modified touchpads Yellow had altered to take into account the thickness of clumsy quartz fingers. White had been incredulous, and faintly scandalised, that she’d taught a jasper to read, let alone have her take over the scouting duties on the surface of a flint.

 _“I only have six flints,”_  Yellow had argued,  _“And a battalion of jaspers. It’s only efficient to increase proficiency in a diverse range of areas.”_

 _“Efficient, indeed,”_  White had said, her grey eyes considering, and then she’d told Yellow to take control of Zaria, where there were, she assured Yellow, with something like humour if it had been any other gem, substantial flint deposits.

The memory made Yellow glow with pride.

Blue scoffed jealously. “Come on,” she said, coldly, “When has White ever done anything to make our lives easier, or reward us for, well, anything? This is a test, and you’ve been set up to fail, so she can humiliate you for her own amusement, like normal.” She still looked stung, and abruptly, Yellow’s satisfaction turned to ashes in her mouth at Blue’s hurt, even as Blue’s words roused her anger in a fluster of denial.

But then Yellow’s shoulders sagged, and she took Blue’s point. “I suppose,” she muttered, averting her eyes to scan the screen she had been working on before Blue had called, schematic for a revolutionary new transport system that Yellow hoped would help defeat any need for travel on Kroag’s blistering surface, uncomfortable even for gems.

“Oh, Yellow,” said Blue again.

Yellow listlessly scribbled the answers to a few equations on her notes, trying to calculate the minimum width of the tunnel needed. If only there was some way to produce the effects of zero-gravity in a stabilised chamber to restrict the height of any gems travelling. Or perhaps, force the gem’s hard light projection to temporarily dissipate so that the physical gem was the only object travelling. If only she could cut out the tunnel completely – no, better yet, create an intangible one – enough to warp hard light-

“Yellow!” Blue broke her concentration, scowling, and sheepishly, Yellow dismissed the screen.

“Sorry, Blue,” Yellow said, trying her best to disguise the fact that her fingers were twitching for the screen.

Blue shook her head and smiled. “I was just saying, it feels like centuries since I saw you last. Don’t you have – any free time?” By the awkward tone of her voice, Yellow thought that that was probably not what Blue had said at all, but she welcomed the change of topic from White.

Yellow made a few quick calculations in her head and winced. It had in fact been centuries, quite a few more than intended. “I’ve been busy,” she began, apologetically, then gave up and stopped there.

Blue understood. Her head dipped, her hair concealing her face from the screen a moment, and then she uttered a rattling sigh. “It’s all right,” she said gracefully, “I know how you are when you get caught up.”

Yellow instantly felt worse. She felt her shoulders hunching, the way they always did when she was nervous, trying to make herself smaller, apologetic for her existence, things about herself that she couldn’t change. A spark of irritation flared up – she only ever felt this way when Blue or White deigned to speak to her. Almost instantly, guilt crushed it. Blue was right.

“I’ve not been the most observant either,” Blue continued mournfully, “I’m sorry I kept missing your calls.”

“Yes, well,” Yellow said, a little more sharply than she’d intended. In the early days, she’d made certain to allot time in her schedule, pencilling in calls with Blue every seven rotations, at the same time, every time. Blue had missed half and prematurely ended the rest, caught up in her own work. “I assumed you were simply – busy.”

“How does White make it look so easy?” Blue joked, an attempt at humour to break the awkwardness that had fallen.

“By delegating.”  _And not caring about anyone else._  Yellow’s voice was short, not wanting to discuss White Diamond, or Zaria. Her eyes turned longingly to her screen, the little tab with her notes, waiting to be expanded on. If White had been impressed by Yellow’s screens and solar panels, she would be overwhelmed by a transport system that took out any overland shuttles at all.

In the background of Blue’s call, lights suddenly flared on and Yellow heard shouts and a scuffle of shoes. Blue half-turned, then sighed mightily.

“Excuse me, Yellow,” she said, formally, “I have to attend to this. Duty calls.”

“Of course,” said Yellow, tightly, and smiled when Blue’s screen winked out. For a moment, she paused, hands resting on the desk and eyes staring into nowhere. Centuries, it had been, since she’d last seen Blue face to face. But still, that call had lasted almost three minutes – a new record.

Yellow sighed. Missing Blue hurt so much that she could barely concentrate when she allowed herself to think about it, but there was work to be done to distract her. There was always work to be done.


	3. Language/Song

The Festival of Song was in full swing, and Homeworld was bustling with energy. The seat of White Diamond’s power was packed with any gem that meant anything to anyone for the most illustrious festival on the calendar. Aristocrats jostled for space in the ornate balconies and clean, cold and clear plazas that White Diamond’s architects preferred, every speck of marble-pale pillar and obsidian-dark roof glittering with grandeur, accented with spiralling fractals of glass and the gems that powered the entirety of the White Court, previous troublemakers turned tools to glorify White Diamond’s cities.

Privately, Blue Diamond was both awed and dismayed at the terrible beauty of White Diamond’s Homeworld. It was austere and elegant, sharply monochrome, riddled with reminders to stay relevant or become a power source for the next glorious light display White had planned. And there were plenty during this festival, the most important of all of them, the one that celebrated the language of all gemkind – music.

It was everywhere. Sound pounded from every district, every corner, every alley, every hall had its doors thrown open, gems pulsing and flickering as if tuned into a collective beat, as if the whole of Homeworld was shuddering to an unseen, but felt rhythm that captivated the entirety of their kind. There was no place untouched by the noise, barely anywhere to catch half a moment of solace, but Yellow and Blue had come as close to solitude as they could in a desperate effort to catch a moment alone for the first time in years.

They had spent the first few rotations of the festival dancing attendance on White Diamond, who was in her element, replete with satisfaction and arrogant power, more beautiful and lovely than any display put before her. White had led the choruses herself, as was her wont, shattering half a dozen of her most beloved aristocrats with the power of her voice, their youngest, Pink Diamond, only half a beat behind her. Blue found it difficult to feel sorry for the shattered fools that had stood too close – they had gone in ecstasy, and they were all replaceable, anyway. White would be down there now still, singing, bowled over in the frenzies of her subjects – if Blue strained, she thought she could hear White, even from half a planet away – but at least she had released Yellow and Blue from the pampering required to upkeep the unified image of the Authority to enjoy the holiday.

“All that noise,” Yellow sneered, “is giving me a headache.”

Blue sighed noiselessly, wishing that she could smooth away the deep grooves of anger lining Yellow’s brow, the tenseness and rigidity with which she held herself, refusing to be caught off guard on this festival of all festivals. The nature of Yellow’s defect had left her gem unable to quicken, and as such, the stirring lifeblood of music and song that thrummed through every gem from diamonds to quartzes was nothing but sound to her. Yellow stood blind in kaleidoscopic rivers of beauty, and felt only the battering of the water.

They were tangled together on a huge cushion inset into the floor of White Diamond’s solar, crushing silk under their huge bodies. Yellow had stripped off her coat, which was actual fabric, and her boots, so that her sock feet tussled with Blue’s bare ones. Blue was pillowing her head on Yellow’s shoulder, resting. Her whole body ached with fatigue, and her eyelids felt as heavy as mountains, but she dared not fall asleep while Yellow was in this mood, testy and filled to the brim with silent fury. The closeness of their bodies was nothing but a deception for the distance between their minds.

Blue let herself take pleasure in it nonetheless.

She trailed her fingers repetitively over Yellow’s shoulder to the upper slant of her gem in a soothing, circular pattern, enjoying the absence of the shoulder pads, though at some point in the years they had spent apart Yellow had taken to covering her shoulders, splashed as they were with blue impurities. It made Blue a little sad. Yellow had always worn the hallmarks of the accident that had irrevocably tied them together with a certain sort of pride that Blue had envied even as she had covered the distinctive yellow stripes on herself.

She had changed. They both had. Blue wondered how much, wondered if it was possible to tell.

In an effort to distract Yellow, she tilted her head so that her lips brushed against Yellow’s jawline, and whispered with no small amount of mischief, lips moving against skin, “I wonder if she’s taken Pink here yet.”

It worked. Yellow stiffened, and Blue grinned as her eyes flew wide both at the double entendre and as the realisation set in that White Diamond almost certainly had taken Pink Diamond to (and probably in) the isolated solar that they lay in, which was normally her most prized sanctuary, deserted now for the tempting pleasures of the Song Festival.

It was certainly a beautiful room, in the same way that White herself was beautiful, in a strangely aloof and yet alluringly prismatic sense. It was an ancient majesty of circular rooftop edged by tall, ribbed pillars to a domed ceiling, which was decorated with a vibrantly coloured frieze depicting diamonds Yellow and Blue had never met. Tough canvas walled off the rest of the world, with silk and taffeta hung billowing in front in an endless froth of fabric. The movement of the silk in the persistent wind and the frieze were the only decoration, and yet the spartan simplicity was in itself an art-form that White alone had perfected.

“I do not need that mental image,” Yellow stated, in a long-suffering tone. “I have had enough. She told me earlier, before you arrived, that she understands why those prating clusters of chalk worship the moon goddess. Apparently, she now understands the meaning of ‘rapturous beauty’.” Yellow scoffed. “I never understood why she tolerated them in the first place.”

Blue chuckled. “’There’s no practical use for a deity whose existence is questionable’,” she quoted a Yellow of long ago, who had hurled the statement at an implacable White during one of their more memorable arguments, her smile widening as Yellow blushed. “Trust White to find religion between a pretty gem’s thighs.”

“She is pretty, isn’t she?” Yellow murmured. “Beautiful.”

Blue hummed agreement. “Pink is a Diamond.”

“I almost pity her stuck here with White, but White would have my gem if I tried to tear her away,” Yellow said sourly.

“Mm, maybe she’s worried that you’ll teach Pink all your blasphemous ways while she’s still young and impressionable,” Blue teased, and sighed inwardly when Yellow tensed under her in anger again.

“At least I don’t waste my time with stupid festivals –“

“Oh, Yellow,” Blue sighed. “Is it that bad? Surely even you can hear that the music actually sounds quite pleasant.”

“Oh, _even I._ ”

“Yellow, you know I didn’t mean it like that,” Blue said hastily, trying to avert the thunderstorm brewing in Yellow’s voice. She reached to touch Yellow’s cheek, but Yellow wrenched herself out of Blue’s reach and sat up instead. “Yellow, please,” Blue begged, “I barely see you, I don’t want to fight.”

The line of her shoulders rigid, Yellow bit out, “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine,” Blue said, unimpressed. Daringly, she placed her hand on Yellow’s spine, wincing when she felt how stiffly Yellow was holding herself.

“Leave it,” Yellow ordered, shrugging off Blue’s hand.

“Not if you’re going to be like this,” Blue snapped.

 _“Blue,”_  Yellow growled.

Blue bit her lip and softened her voice, apologetically. “I want – I just wish you knew what it felt like, to-“

“Be a normal gem?” Yellow interrupted spitefully. “Wouldn’t we both like to know?”

“That’s not what I was going to say and you know it,” Blue said cuttingly, feeling her voice going sharp and cold the way it did when one of her subjects displeased her. Why did she have to be so – angry? Blue couldn’t imagine a life without music, but it wasn’t like she didn’t understand what it was like to be incapable of something that another could do with perfect ease. Blue had emerged too small, and just to look like everyone else, she had to stretch out her body until she was as weak as a half cracked pearl, relying on a mechanical exoskeleton to move. She could only dream of Yellow’s easy physicality.

“It’s what you mean,” Yellow sniped sulkily. “But I don’t need  _the language of gem kind_ , or whatever you want to call it. My production line is twice as efficient as both of yours, put together. I’m just as good as you are.”

“I know that,” Blue said, hearing her voice come out too sharp and regretting it instantly, “I just – want to show you-“

“How?!” Yellow demanded, half twisting to pin Blue with a venomous glare, “Are you-“

“We could fuse!” Blue overrode her with a shout, and the moment the nigh-treasonous words left her lips they both fell silent, stunned by the temerity of even suggesting it, fusion, in White Diamond’s sanctuary of all places.

For a long moment, Blue found herself simply staring back into Yellow’s equally shocked eyes, automatically noting how a sun-coloured blush was spreading over Yellow’s cheeks, how her hands fidgeted like she wanted to reach for Blue, how her breath caught with the same confusing mix of ingrained revulsion and desire so powerfully illicit that she could barely think around it. Blue knew that she was remembering Ceta, the swamp, Green’s body cradled in the sucking mire, trees breaking like kindling, their strength, their fusion, their secret.

“F-Fuse?” Yellow repeated, uncharacteristically diffident for once.

There was no way to turn back now. Blue lifted her chin and said with a strength she didn’t feel, “Yes.”

“With me?” Yellow still sounded baffled. “Now? Here?”

“Yes.” Blue swallowed. “As Green, you could – we could feel… this.” She gestured vaguely the air around them, the cacophony of gem-song surging around the base of the tower.

Yellow blinked rapidly. “I don’t – but we’ve not done it in so long,” she whispered hoarsely, but Blue knew that she wanted to, because she couldn’t stop herself from reaching out and grasping Blue’s elbows, leaning closer, as if they could fuse from that alone.

“That doesn’t matter,” Blue said strongly. “Come on, get up. We’re going to do it. We’re going to-”

“Fuse,” Yellow finished, leaping to her feet and gently drawing Blue up with her. In her eyes there was an old excitement, a familiar fire that made a corresponding heat flood Blue from her suddenly flushed cheeks to her tingling toes. And suddenly, White Diamond and her disapproval seemed impossibly distant.

Blue settled her hands on Yellow’s shoulders, smoothing down Yellow’s shirt, feeling her palms damp with sudden nerves. Yellow’s hands found her hips, settled there with a squeeze slightly too tight to be comfortable. Blue, restraining a wince, pretended to ignore it. The fusion would be on her, Blue knew, Yellow was unable to initiate one herself.

The first step was a disaster. They both moved in different directions simultaneously and Yellow nearly tripped over the train of Blue’s dress.

“Sorry,” Blue yelped, and Yellow’s lips settled into a flat line. She breathed in through her nose and took hold of Blue again, as painfully tight as before. Her eyes were flat and cold now, but somehow still alive with a nearly violent want that made Blue shiver when she met Yellow’s gaze. Blue swallowed and hid her head against Yellow’s shoulder instead, feeling it as giving and comfortable as a brick wall against her forehead.

They started moving again, in stilted circles, but the same direction this time. Blue was paying anxious attention to Yellow, feeling the tenseness shift under Yellow’s skin, like she was a predator coiled to strike. They were finding a pattern, repeating it endlessly for fear of deviating and upsetting the other, and the solar was completely silent apart from the rustle of cloth, the pad of their feet, the noisy revelry outside, which had never seemed so far away as in that impossibly tense string of moments that teetered on and on, balancing on the brink of collapse.

Blue closed her eyes and tried to focus on Yellow, bringing to mind everything that made her heart burn with love for her - her impossibly quick mind, her surprisingly gentle heart, the way she always made time for Blue and loved her despite everything, the way she never quite could contain how she felt, the way she caught her breath when they kissed and held Blue so tenderly that she had never raised so much as a bruise on even Blue’s exceedingly fragile skin, the memory of her smile, the way her eyes would crinkle up at the corners and it would turn soft, as soft as honey and sunlight-

Yellow turned her in a circle, and Blue smiled, lifted herself up on her tiptoes, felt her being blossom with warmth and light as she opened her eyes-

And looked directly into Yellow’s cold glare, furrowed into a scowl of concentration. It was an unfamiliar scowl, laden with stress, exhaustion and a razor-sharp, cold calculation that could only remind Blue of White Diamond’s uncaring, detached way of looking at the world. A bolt of ice shot through the warmth of readiness and punctured her elation like a balloon. Blue stumbled, tripped backwards over one of Yellow’s discarded boots and fell back onto the pillow.

Bewildered, Blue panted for breath, her hand automatically touching her gem, reassured when she found it whole and safe in her chest. Her eyes flew upwards, to Yellow, silhouetted and looming, an almost terrifying shape against the pale silk background, straight-shouldered, aloof, fists clenching – a stranger, Blue realised in dismay.

 _No, no,_ Blue thought frantically, _no-_

But it was too late. She had already failed.

“L-Let’s try again,” she said breathlessly, trying to push herself up on shaking arms.

“Give it up!” Yellow snarled, and Blue flinched before she could stop herself. Yellow caught the action and turned away instantly, but not before Blue saw the flash of agony in her eyes. “We can’t fuse,” Yellow proclaimed with the finality of a death toll.

“Of course we can!” Blue protested. “We’ve done it before!”

Yellow shook her head in contempt. Her voice had become very cold, stern, dripping with self-righteous authority. “I was never meant to fuse, Blue, and neither were you. What are you, some sort of topaz? Fusion is just a cheap tactic to make weak gems stronger, and _I am not_   _weak._ ”

Flabbergasted, Blue fought off rising anger and sat up. “No one was calling you weak!”

Yellow scorned her, her voice bitter and too loud. “But you were, weren’t you? Sighing at me, offering to fuse so I can experience your ridiculous music, as if I’m the one to be pitied – at least I can stand upright by myself!”

“Yellow!” Blue barked, well and truly angry now, but Yellow cut across with a vicious hand motion.

“Enough! I’m not like White, or Pink! And you can put on all the airs and graces you like, but neither are you! We’re defective! We’ll never be the same as them! And the sooner you remember that and stop lording over me-“

“Lording- I’ve never-“ Blue spluttered, but Yellow interrupted again.

“You always have!” She bellowed, “Don’t try to pretend as if-“

“You’re being irrational, Yellow!” Blue shouted back, feeling tears threaten the way they always did whenever confrontations came. Angrily, she swiped them away, propelling herself to her feet with a flex of the water contained within the tubes of her exoskeleton. “Be quiet or I’ll make you-“

“Is that supposed to be a threat?” Yellow strode up close, getting in Blue’s face, using every inch of her impressive physical advantage to intimidate, her entire face warped with rage, and, almost hidden, a deep-set hurt and bitterness. “I’m being irrational, am I? Overemotional? You’re such a hypocrite!”

“Shut up!” Blue yelled, feeling herself start crying and not caring, “Can’t you  _control yourself?”_

Yellow twitched, and for half an instant Blue genuinely feared that Yellow would strike her. She stumbled back with a gasp of terror, and Yellow’s eyes widened. This time she did not turn away, and Blue felt guilt hit her like a punch to the gut as Yellow’s lip trembled, and she blinked fast, something suspiciously wet on her lash before a clumsy fist shoved it away.

“I suppose  _not_ ,” Yellow snapped, her attempt at haughtiness ruined by the crack in her voice. She turned on her heel and stormed out.

In the aftermath, Blue wrapped her arms around her stomach, doubled over, and cried.


	4. Empire/War

The argument before the world as Yellow Diamond knew it changed forever had become engraved in her memory with hyper-realistic sharpness, as if it had passed moments rather than years ago. The next time they saw each other, their mortality would be written all over each other’s faces, and everything would be impossibly different. But for now, all she felt was a frustrated maelstrom of emotion, and the weight of Blue Diamond’s eyes, the way they sparked when they warred. For this was war, for them.

The Diamond’s battleground was one of meeting rooms that were sharp, clean, without aesthetic, in isolated, liminal moon bases built for these purposes only. They had to be removed from the planet proper so that the slightest hint of a power-struggle could not reach their subjects, and more importantly, could not clash against the unified image of the Authority. Reputations were priceless, hard-won and quick-lost, the only thing that they were unwilling to sacrifice in the perpetual grapple for gains, a coveted colony, a perfect planet. They swapped servants like fine purses, wore their achievements like bank statements, counting the number of zeros off against one another, gloating at a well-executed bargain.

There was no pure brutality of an arena, watching eyes and bright gems, swept-clear stone, chilly breezes, kept stark and open and therefore rulebound. There was no public accountability, only the silent companionship of thousands of years shackled all together; they could escape any gem but each other. They could fight and flail and fail to fuse all they liked, but in centuries, they still only had the stagnancy of the same relationships, the same tired faces, the same tired arguments. They were worn out, worn in, stuck in the same antagonistic rut which overlapped into moments of relief, closeness, intimacy, passion and hatred balanced together with the caution of immortality. Discipline, at this level, was self-imposed and less than rigorously maintained.

They were Diamond, and they were made to lead, and compromise was difficult at the best of times. But in the middle of open civil war and across an innocuous, steely-straight table, Yellow Diamond and Blue Diamond were polarised. They spat for the pleasure of spitting and pretended not to be thinking about a nicer exchange of synthetic saliva they had no purpose having. Any tension could be made into an argument, if they were desperate enough, an argument of painful secrets and not-quite forgotten fights.

But in White’s company, they had to play their proper, professional part in the theatre of a diamond debate. She hung over them like stifling fog, suffocating on euphoria and exhaling poison.

Pink should have been hosting, since the planet the base orbited was her colony, her Earth. Instead, it was White, Yellow, and Blue standing around a holographic projection of Earth with the facet lines glowing with different colours depending on who currently had possession (bright pink for the rebels, white for Homeworld), arguing about Pink’s sudden disappearance a few rotations prior. The scouting parties they’d sent out were unsuccessful.

They didn’t know yet that Pink Diamond was absent because she had been cracked into mutilated pieces over the steps of her own palanquin.

White was staring silently at the map, arms folded, an unhealthy greyish pallor to her colourless cheeks; she looked wrung out, somehow limp and finished. Sometimes, in the dragging rotations that followed, Yellow wondered if White had known – had suspected. Yellow’s hands were planted on the table, disturbing the projection and making it ripple with static around her wrists like disrupted water. Blue opposed her, the only one seated, her hands folded in her lap and her every muscle radiating chilly disdain. They argued in tense, not quite hushed voices, straining back and forth and skirting around the horrible, huge absence that would later forever shatter their image of invulnerability.

“We’re in the middle of a war,” Yellow was losing her temper, hearing her voice raise, trying to forget the last time she’d shouted at Blue. An isolated solar, with music pounding wild and fey outside, twisting silk, their bodies, close together. “None of that matters,” she told herself, and Blue, and their argument.

Blue’s eyes flared like a solar eclipse. She hated to be told she didn’t matter. It was a lie but one that Blue was too ready to believe from Yellow. Yellow tried to pretend that in itself didn’t wound her more than anything Blue could spit at her. Under the shadow of her hood, her expression was impossible to guess and utterly obvious at once – offended lip, narrowed eyes, slanted brow, the language of fury. Yellow forbade the shiver that wanted to work its way up her knotted-tense spine.

“Of course you say it doesn’t,” Blue snapped back in the quiet tone she used when she was at her angriest, “All both of you want is to seize control of Pink.”

White did not react to the statement, didn’t bother to deny it. After the resistance she had put up to Pink leaving the protectiveness of Homeworld for her first colony, it would have been a thin and weak denial. White did not enjoy contradicting the obvious.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Yellow cried, incredulous, “What would  _I_ want with  _Earth?”_

“You have to let her learn on her own! If I was struggling with a little rebellion problem there is no way that it would warrant all three of us coming down here to ‘supervise’,” Blue hissed back. She had supported Pink most vehemently during the battle to wear down White’s control of her, and remained defensive of her freedom. Their positions were entrenched, these debates over and done, no new progress was made, stagnation was the name of the game.

“And if you had gone missing, I suppose you think that we-“- _I-_ “wouldn’t care at all? What matters now is finding her!”

On this, they all agreed, but Blue mimicked offence to be contrary, because even the most minor of victories could not be given easily. Yellow had forbidden anything to be easy. Forgiveness was too tempting, and emotions had become inefficient.

“She’ll turn up,” Blue said instead, almost airily, sounding so much like Pink’s carelessness that Yellow saw White’s jaw tense.

 _“Blue,”_ Yellow said, half-warning, though Blue would surely be watching White as well. Appearances mattered when touch was off the table.

“Quiet!” White finally snapped, and the both of them instantly obeyed, Yellow swallowing the rest of the words with an instinctive scowl. White’s brows pulled down over her pale, cold eyes, like two chips of ice hung before the moon. “You’re wasting time that cannot afford to be lost.”

These were a Diamond’s battlegrounds, and unlike the fury of a fight, debate could be stopped at a cutting statement and the illusion of control. It had become an illusion, after Pink had left Homeworld and proven that White could lose, but it was a compelling one nonetheless.

“Diopside,” White said, chilly eyes never leaving the two of them.

A hulking shape appeared instantly in the doorway, and Diopside crossed her chest in the strange, one-armed version of the diamond salute, the mechanical arm Yellow had built for her hanging limply at her side. Yellow startled, then fought to restrain her reaction and pretend that she had known Diopside was there all along. Diopside was never far from her beloved mistress’ side, particularly, she reminded herself belatedly, considering they were standing on a moon above a planet involved in open rebellion against everything White Diamond and the Authority stood for – law and order in the galaxy.

“Ready my ship,” White ordered, crossing her arms over her chest again, as if she was trying to pull herself together, “I’m going to look for Pink myself.”

A beat of silence passed, in which Diopside’s murky green gaze remained fixed on White Diamond, her face stiff and emotionless, but for the way a tic jumped in her left cheek. Her natural arm was held rigidly, hard muscle bulging against the skin. Yellow’s eyes skimmed over Diopside’s broad, barrel chest, tracing the stern lines of rigid muscle that she almost knew by heart. Diopside had trained Yellow in the arts of war, ingraining familiarity with time and tension, and was a constant shadow just behind White, a harbinger of her presence.

White raised her chin, and tapped her fingers against her forearm deliberately. Diopside’s head bowed slightly, and she muttered a reluctant acquiescence as she stalked out. After that, White seemed to feel that there was nothing more to say, and she kept her glare on Yellow and Blue, forbidding them to speak, to question her edict. They all knew that it was too dangerous for White to go to Earth, where the rebellion was thickest and the gems had no personal loyalty to her, where she symbolised the tyranny of the Authority. They all knew that White wouldn’t listen, because she was blinded with love, and it had made her irrational and desperate. They all knew that reminding White of that aloud was idiotic in the extreme.

Still silence as thick as soup smothered Yellow in its grip. Perversely, she glanced about for her pearl, for her work, anything to distract her from inevitability of being stuck in a room with Blue and White and her feelings, and the inescapable absence of Pink. Yellow ground her teeth, clenching her fists and restraining the urge to pace. White was statuesque, silhouetted by the light of the open door, the planes of her face gleaming with iridescent brilliance.

Blue was hunched, enshrouded, and it seemed as if the whole world’s gravity rested in her, an undeniable orbit like the suck of a black hole and Yellow the stupid, burning comet caught in her claws, folding into oblivion when Blue raised her head and looked at her, with eyes as deep and bright as the colour of Kroag IV’s skies, cloud- and merciless. Blue lifted her hand, trembling, and Yellow bit off a groan in her chest, lest White hear, and stalked to her, boots clacking loudly, despite her attempts to place her feet gently. These days, she could never be anything other than imposing. Somewhere along the way, she had forgotten how to be soft.

White watched, her lip curling.

Blue almost looked terrified when Yellow stood up behind her chair and rested her hands on her thin shoulders, her grip like an iron vice, but relief won out. Blue’s head dipped as if the weight was too much for her to hold, and her shaking hand touched Yellow’s fingers digging into her shoulders briefly, lightly, like the brush of snow, fast-melted and gone, leaving nothing in its wake but a slick of sweat under Yellow’s gloves.

In an instant, they were reunited again, together against the immovable barrier that was White. Yellow fought off gratitude, pleasure, happiness, and focused on feeling cold and solid and strong, dependable, like metal. She could not leach Blue’s comfort without offering strength. Interactions between them were transactions, nothing more.

 _Nothing less._  Her thumb smoothed rebelliously against Blue’s collarbone, and Blue’s breath jittered against the weight of her palms. Too close, too much, not enough. Yellow wondered if Blue felt this need too, this agony of inexpression hanging around her neck like an albatross of lead, the necessity of leading ahead making it impossible to walk alongside.

Yellow wondered if Blue remembered Ceta. Remembered how they had once been close enough to intermingle. White was staring at her as if she knew Yellow’s thoughts, and Yellow tilted her chin up proudly to her stare. White liked to pretend that she was purely ignorant, but Yellow knew that she had been stained, taken, loved and fused by ghosts that had left their marks on the world only in White’s memories. Let her try to make Yellow ashamed. There was nothing White could do to her that was worse than the recrimination Yellow served herself.

Blue’s shoulders pressed tentatively back into Yellow’s hands and Yellow closed her eyes again. Blue, on the other hand…Diamonds were supposed to be indestructible, yet Yellow felt as close to shattering as she ever could be with Blue.

Diopside’s returning feet were audible from halfway up the staircase, unnecessarily stomping to vent her displeasure about White risking herself like this. White didn’t bother to wait for her to get to the top, and swept out without a word of goodbye. Something in the room tightened when she left.

Unmonitored, unwatched, unrestricted, Yellow stood with her hands on Blue’s shoulders and pressed her thumb against Blue’s collarbone. It would not be hard to snap her like kindling between her hands. Blue had once been attracted to Yellow’s strength, a long time ago. Nowadays – Blue’s spine went rigid – she feared it.

With a reluctance she told herself she didn’t feel, Yellow dropped the contact and made to leave after White.

“Some of us,” she remarked to Blue over her shoulder, archly, “still have an empire to run.”

Blue’s eyes stirred with fire again, and Yellow hurried out before she could retaliate. It would not do to push her luck, to let them too close. This was already the most they had touched each other in centuries.


	5. Veil/Peace

In the silence, Blue’s ghosts felt real. Alive, bygones, kept murky by the perpetual shadow of the hood. She’d needed something to keep the unbearable brightness of the sun away. The veil hung low over her eyes and made everything the same, intermediate grey, unremarkable, missable. Blue watched days fade in and out.

Peace had been won and business was going on. The negotiating table was four pointed and Pink Diamond’s place was still set, as if she would come back. They sat, sometimes stood, around the table, watching each other fade in and out like the sun behind the screen on Earth, passing behind clouds and shining in pale yellow rays. White Diamond’s face was a ghastly sight, nowadays, so Blue took the veil and brought it low over her eyes, and learnt how to forget everything.

Time shuddered away like a fish between her hands. Blue stood still in the stream and watched the world leap away from her.

Negotiations continued. Military went to White first. Blue gained new aristocrats who looked at her brokenly with black accusation. They didn’t want her. Blue didn’t want them. She sent them away to distant planets, so she wouldn’t have to look at them anymore.

Something was wrong with White. They were skirting it, pretending to ignore it. Blue pulled the veil down over her eyes. They continued parcelling out the courts and Blue felt Black Diamond’s song throbbing in her bones.

One day, White didn’t come back. They kept going. Pink was huge in her shadowy absence. The hood shaded everything together. Neither asked after White Diamond. They felt her break, somewhere, in their chests behind their gems, lodged in their bones. Alone at the end of the world, Blue begged for something to follow and Yellow splintered.

“What are we going to do now?” Blue asked. “Fix it, Yellow,” she maybe said, somewhere underneath the shadow, somewhere in the never-ending night that stretched without Pink.

“Blue.” Yellow’s face sagged terribly, dark circles hollowing her cheekbones, skin pasty-wan, like gone-off milk. “Blue.”

“Why didn’t you make something that could fix this?” Blue demanded, flinging the hood back, trembling to her feet. Yellow backed away as if punched. She looked empty, somehow.

“I didn’t know,” Yellow whispered, seeming so small, her body hunching in on itself, trying to make herself tiny. “I didn’t know, Blue – this isn’t fair-“

“Why didn’t you?” Blue snarled, stepped forward aggressively. Yellow crumpled under the onslaught like damp paper.

“Blue,” Yellow appealed, and even quieter, added, “Please.”

Blue thought Yellow was crying, but she’d been weeping too much and with the veil in her eyes, she couldn’t see a thing. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. If Yellow couldn’t fix it then it would stay that way. Pink was gone. Yellow was on her knees and Blue didn’t want any more guilt, so she walked away. It was easier to keep walking until she forgot where she was going and the darkness was all around her.

Pink was gone. Blue took three weeks off and fell into silence.

They were back in the room again and things were sharper now, awakened from a fuzzy sleep. The light glared flatly down at the grey steely table. Why was the room so grey? Yellow was standing and wouldn’t look her in the eye. She made battle strategies like apologies.

 “- We have half the gems we need,” Yellow was ranting, gesticulating wildly. Blue made an effort to pretend to listen. “The new peridots – have you seen those ugly things? I had to give them enhancements to give them the smallest amount of their sharding dignity back!”

Yellow was pacing again, frustration wound taut inside of her like a coiled spring. Blue looked colourlessly at her from the shadow of the dark hood as if Yellow was one of Pink’s little humans, kept captive and stupid in a cage, repeating rhythms that Blue saw outside of, questioned the use of. Yellow was part of a life that Blue had found herself thrust outside of, an alien creature that Blue no longer understood.

“So this is how era two begins,” Blue murmured dryly. “With failure and budget cuts. Some peace, Yellow.”

Yellow exploded. Her fists buckled the table into two, she roared, beat at the wall like an animal. There was something unhinged in her in that moment, raw, furious venting of anger and poison, and yet she veered away from Blue as if repelled by a magnet.

Blue pulled the veil down and hid from Yellow, the demanding, whirlwind passion of her. Peace was stillness. Blue had got in the habit of losing time and and now the world was spinning around her out of control, and everything was fading away, the room, the table, the courts – all there was left was Yellow, in the zoo, berating her, in the zoo, singing to her, in the darkness, pretending not to cry, Yellow, breaking everything in sight because it wasn’t enough.

The slippery descent paused and came into a startling moment of clarity, like the first breath of winter. Yellow was holding her, strong chest heaving with some emotion that Blue hadn’t kept track of, jaw tense and knitted, the corner of her eyes lined with the crowfeet of stress. She’d become flat and unsmiling, bleak and repressed, an emotional cliff, but her body was still warm, still had a semblance of need to it, in the way she held Blue like she always did, arms cupping the space around her, as if Blue was something infinitely precious and fragile to be protected.

“What are we going to do?” Blue asked at the end of the world, feathering her fingernails through the short, tufty hairs at the nape of Yellow’s neck, resisting the urge to scratch and pull and hurt, just to make Yellow’s closed off, blank expression change. In silence, Yellow weathered the beating of the elements, the currents of time that slipped and faded around Blue so interchangeably, for both of them.

“Continue,” Yellow snapped, as if it was obvious. “We are Diamond.”

It was all they could do. Blue Diamond had never felt so powerless. This was the peace that Pink’s memory had left them.


	6. Tired/Era

White Diamond had told Yellow Diamond once that time healed all wounds. Yellow traced the path of her logic, but as with technology, if a fault was ignored, the crack widened, and the whole engine was lost.  _(Replace the third generator core on Beta I.)_ At the time, Yellow had thought her the expert on grief, because no one else had lost as many as White claimed she had, but in the wake of White’s collapse, Yellow knew her for the real liar. If White had understood anything about how to deal with grief, she had forgotten it. It didn’t get easier to deal with, so Yellow simply got better at not dealing with it.

There was work to be done.  _(Attend trial of Sapphire 6IR.)_ There was always work to be done, and never anyone else to share it with, at which Yellow felt twofold resentment and relief. So much time was cut out without the necessary push of power back and forth between the Diamond Courts, a subtle war of politics that consumed energy and efficiency, and offered little. Blue was a constant pallor of herself, a wispy ghost, and she cared none at all when Yellow encroached subtly then directly took over her spheres of control. It was so much more logical this way. Efficient.  _(Order the decommission of defective Cut X6 Heliodors.)_

A clean break. 

Yellow was a Diamond, and given the chance, she seized power and responsibility in greedy handfuls, increasing the pressure on her gem until it mimicked her birth, until maybe she could shatter with the heaviness of her pounding head.  _(Arrange date for call with kindergarten inspector.)_ White Diamond had led the empire for years, by not caring about anyone or anything else. Homeworld had been her life until Pink had taught her how to remember feelings. 

If White could do it, so could Yellow. She was accountable to no one. Who would intervene?

Yellow organised herself into neat sections and cleaved away the inconvenient parts that snagged on the smoothness of her operations. She could wait to have those prickly, painful feelings when Blue was there to poke the wound and make the infection drain.  _(File report on Theta IV.)_ There was no one to stop her. 

 _(Schedule Yellow Pearl a rest cycle.)_ Blue Diamond’s soft, sad, guilty eyes dragged them out of Yellow, the painful things, so Yellow saved up feelings for when she met Blue, pouring out that dark, festering tidal wave, letting Blue shrink away from her. The disappointment and rage was easier than explaining herself. Blue thrived on isolated depression, becoming as limp and weak as her physical body. She lost height like others would weight, body ballooning outwards, as soft and approachable as her grief forbade her to be. ( _Theta XIV's kindergarten has run dry. The last batch was defective. Investigate coral replacements.)_

Yellow in turn become her polar opposite, rigid, unyielding, prepared to break before she bent. She'd always been the obnoxious file against the hammer, now she echoed it in appearance, strict, sharp, nowhere to find purchase, to dig in and funnel through the cracks. White had chosen robes, a long loose shift and cape, things that swept away the detritus of her path and left it cleaner, now Yellow chose walls made of gloves and shoulder pads, concealing her true shape under cunning fabric tricks. ( _Order more industrial pearls. Bixbite shipment to Ceta II.)_

All that happened was that, in time, the mask became harder to peel away and eventually became her face, skin to skin, slipping in, the way Blue had been once. Once.

Yellow Diamond looked forwards, dragging the empire behind her, because she couldn't face the past.

And there was work to be done. 

 _(Commission another ship and implement the organic synthesising advancements.)_  Gems didn't need sleep, but rest was recommended to perform at optimum efficiency. Yellow remembered precisely the last time she had slept - wrapped, with Blue, on the spare big cushion that Earth's diamond kept for visiting tired Diamonds, four days before it had happened. Five thousand years later, she was still going, untrusting, unresting, unfeeling. ( _Order Morganite 7DL's report. Investigate containment breach of White's palace.)_

To be efficient, Yellow Diamond only had to provide a central hub of information to choreograph (White would have called it that, too) her delegated tasks. To be efficient, she only had to be bigger, faster and better than all other gems. With competition like miserable, moping, mourning Blue - Yellow didn't need sleep to surpass her. ( _Commence total harvesting of Theta asteroids. Scan the western sector with aquamarine scouts.)_

She was beginning to realise she never had. White had observed that when she had taken Zaria. No one else was left to do what needed to be done, while Blue revelled in weakness and self-pity, so Yellow did it. She ordered swift, harsh justice and uncoupled gem immortality with lethargy. There was no time to waste, even if a gem could theoretically live forever. All lost their lustre eventually. ( _The Peridots need new enhancements. Weaponry suggested.)_

Yellow had become very proficient at ignoring small, bodily discomforts. Her hard light body ached, she had dropped three work screens, scrambling the contents, in a week. Her eyes felt like blistered holes in her head. Yellow couldn't remember the last time she'd closed them. ( _Initiate call with forward Theta scout group. Prepare colony dropships.)_ But there was work to be done.

An alarm pinged near her elbow, using a very specific four note tone set for private Diamond communication. 

Yellow almost jumped, dragged forcibly out of her work. Dazed, Yellow heard the alarm blare only distantly, exhausted eyes straining to understand the room around her, a thing that was not the angular, harsh shapes of numbers and letters. The moment her racing mind paused, her body chimed in with a plethora of complaints. Her tailbone had gone numb, her legs ached to be stretched, her entire shoulders and back were one huge slab of pain.

Yellow exhaled, considering, as she always did, whether it was worth stopping the work for. It was a comforting constant. It would be there when she returned.

Blue possibly wouldn't be. In the end, if Blue needed it, Yellow would sacrifice anything to get it, even if it was something as major, as minor, as an hour or two free.

This Diamond alarm had chimed at a regular set interval ever since Yellow had first programmed it over ten thousand years ago, when she and Blue had begun their first colonies. It was a reminder to speak with Blue, update her orders from White, and once upon a time, offer a teaching visit to Earth. The diamond there had thrived on contact. Like Blue, Yellow thought that she had never had the spine to be Diamond. 

But then, hadn't White fooled them all for years, only to break at the last, most desperate moment? Only Yellow was left to do what needed to be done.

"Pearl," said Yellow, "Prepare my ship."

"Yes, my Diamond!" 

She worked on the ship journey, kept adding half-second, last-minute orders to Yellow Pearl even as she walked towards the door to Blue’s chambers, feeling her confidence and her shoulders sag lower into her chest with each step. Her whole form was screaming at her. She had embarrassingly glitched not once, but twice on the journey, once when trying to stand, once when the ship had taken off with a minute jerk. None of her gems had been stupid enough to say anything, but Yellow Diamond caught the pitiful concern in her pearl’s overworked hollows of eyes.

It was as if Blue held, teasingly, tantalisingly, the last block in the tower that kept Yellow standing, the tower built of bricks of careful strategies designed to ignore and put off feeling, until there was Blue to whip away the concealment and laugh at the attempt. White had taught her how to paint over the cracks, emit the right sort of sound, naturally authoritative, as if they had been made to lead, but Blue had always made games of unpicking Yellow, driving her, gasping, to her knees. Yellow had learnt from White how to be efficient, uncaring, and objective – Blue had learnt from White how to be cold and cruel, how to unshell a gem in moments, peel back the soft vulnerable parts of them to be evaluated dispassionately.

_“Why didn’t you make something that could fix this?”_

Yellow hesitated in front of the doors. Her hand, shaking, had risen to the touch-pad, but she had yet to request entry. It would be granted, she knew. Blue knew she would be coming. She came every time. After everything, still Yellow returned for more punishment, more weeping, more helpless, emotional Blue, grief-wracked and weary-worn with tears.

Without Yellow, Blue would barely exert herself to do the bare minimum that her gems desperately needed. If not for Blue, then for the good of Homeworld, Yellow had to go to her, and pretend that holding Blue didn’t aggravate the tension banded over her shoulders, as if her weeping didn’t stain Yellow’s coat with guilt. As if Yellow would ever leave Blue. As if the habit of looking out for Blue wasn't entrenched over thousands of years, written in her gem, sunken into her bones.

There was work to be done.

Blue had become just another task to see to at some point, another duty, another painful, unwelcome job that no one else was available to deal with. The suns knew that Yellow still loved her, but she was so exhausted, so tired of dealing with Blue, frustrated with all the general incompetence, the failure that still dogged her despite everything, the fact that Homeworld was still floundering, the inescapable fact that Yellow simply wasn’t enough by herself.

_“So this is how era two begins – with failure and budget cuts. Some peace, Yellow.”_

Homeworld needed her, so Yellow Diamond sighed, straightened her shoulders, and opened the door to confront Blue Diamond.

Blue’s dipped, lethargic head twisted up when Yellow entered, the brief look of fearful guilt on her face somehow striking into the smug frustration that bubbled in Yellow’s core and validating it before Blue smoothed her expression into the implacable mournful one that she had worn for the last five thousand years.

“Yellow, I wasn’t expecting you,” Blue lied.

“Do I have to ring ahead to visit you, Blue?” Yellow snapped back, as if that wasn’t the exact courtesy they had used before, back in the days when Blue would still leave her rooms voluntarily.

“Of course not,” Blue replied, and there was just a tint too much sincerity, enough to disarm Yellow momentarily, when she added, “It’s always good to see you.”

Riposte diverted, Yellow hid her discomfort by stalking angrily around the room, deliberately drawing attention to the subtle signs of disuse and decay that nestled in the heart of a diamond. She made exclamations of disgust at the outdated technology that Blue kept, and they traded a few more half barbed blows, the stings hidden deep in the murky waters of their shared past. Nothing had felt as difficult as this, as standing with Blue pretending that they were in a past era, one when they could still talk and breathe in each other’s presence, one when they hadn’t become regulated, nothing but a duty to hurry through and set aside as soon as they could.

Yellow baited Blue about her inactivity, her inability to move on, Blue struck back with cutting observations about the poorly hidden exhaustion washing out Yellow’s colours, the dishonesty of ignoring her emotions darkening her eyes, wearying her face.

“You’re losing your lustre,” Blue had murmured in the soft voice she used when she was being cruellest, and Yellow had been unable to hide the jolt of terror that shot through her at that thought – of losing, of loss, of irreparable damage done to herself for Homeworld, of never recovering – where Blue was resigned, Yellow was outright ignoring the problem, as if noticing it made it real.

“Has White spoken to you recently?” Blue asked, and in her accusing eyes the real question was – _do you really think Homeworld can afford to lose another one of us?_

Somehow Blue’s concern was even worse than her weary, depressive contempt. Her condescension that Yellow could afford to take the self-indulgent and luxurious breaks Blue did, with the weight of their responsibilities on Yellow’s shoulders rankled, raised Yellow’s hackles hissing with spite. Yellow said something back, something venomous with the strength of industrial acid, but Blue didn’t seem to care. Her own mind had probably spat worse at her.

 “Who else is going to do it, Blue?” Yellow demanded - _th_ _is is era two, the Authority doesn't have time to be fallible._


	7. Free Day!

 

There was something volcanic under the skin. Blue had never felt colder, but there was something tectonic, a silent, invisible pressure that built into a mounting fury. Bitterly, her gem radiated ice, and she sat, twisting to death her robes between her hands, fighting to not envisage Yellow’s neck in their place.

Rose Quartz, the last hope of answers, had escaped from their grasp, as taunting as the last wisps of Pink running out of a half-closed door. But it had been Yellow’s heel that had kicked the door shut, in her impatience, her inability to  _control herself._

Blue Diamond had ordered that there would be a trial. She had ordered Blue Zircon to provide answers. She had ordered that Yellow Diamond keep her mouth  _shut,_ and she had been  _slighted,_ and  _ignored._ Blue Diamond’s hands shook, white-knuckled. Her lips were pressed tightly together. Humiliatingly, her eyes were stinging with angry tears.

Yellow Diamond  _knew_ that Blue had needed the trial. And she let Rose Quartz escape. As the days slipped by, it became increasingly likely that they had lost their one chance for good.

An alert chimed softly. Blue’s lips thinned even further, and she raised her head to glare at the door as it opened, revealing Yellow. Slump-shouldered, but spine-straight, Yellow stiffly endured Blue’s glare, her pride sunken into her hollowed eyes and sallow cheeks. There was a tear on her glove and a stain on her coat. She looked like she hadn’t stopped since they’d left the trial chamber, as if she had gone on foot to search for Rose herself. Of course she had. Blue had been so furious that she’d almost thrown Yellow out of the door herself and told her not to come back until she fixed it.

But Yellow had disregarded her, and came back, clearly without Rose. It should’ve made her angry. It just made her exhausted, instead. And relieved. Because Yellow might not have come back at all. Pink didn’t.

Blue quelled the instant snap of fear that thought caused. Rose was dangerous. She had already shattered one Diamond – or had she? But if she  _had,_ and she  _could –_ Blue couldn’t lose another. Homeworld wouldn’t survive without Yellow Diamond. And where would Blue be, without Yellow, whose gem was flecked with parts of Blue as hers was with Yellow? They were supposed to be inseparable. That had always been White’s biggest complaint, hadn’t it?

As Yellow tiredly squared her shoulders and waited for Blue’s anger, Blue wondered how they had got so far from Ceta, the days when they snuck away to fuse in swamps and cried when they had to parted. Would Yellow still huff half-nervously, half-excitedly, the way she used to, if Blue tried to kiss her?  _Probably not,_ thought Blue, with something like a pang.  _She’d push me away, so she could go work._

Blue wasn’t sure she remembered what kissing Yellow even felt like.

“Robonoids have been deployed from every sector,” Yellow said, her words falling with heavy, tired weight, “Your palanquin has been recovered.”

“At least there’s that,” said Blue, aiming for optimistic and ending snappish. Yellow’s face was so guarded that Blue could barely see anything. There was nothing to take hold of and pry open to see how Yellow really felt. Did she even regret her rashness? Impulsively, Blue asked, “Why?”

Impossibly, Yellow stiffened further. “I will not be accused of murder.”

“Well, did you do it?” Blue demanded, recklessly. Not because she wondered, really, because Yellow had loved Pink with that unreserved, devoted passion that she had loved Blue with, and because Yellow was not, at heart, anything like a fighter. Blue did it to be cruel, it clearly hit home, because Yellow’s hands balled into fists and her implacability buckled under hot, furious rage that Blue would even ask, that Blue would even dare. Yellow took a half-stunted step forward, impotent with boiling, blistering anger, before she restrained herself, with evident difficulty, and turned instead to strike the wall.

Her blow hit and crumpled the wall like paper. A sizeable chunk crumbled away from her fist. The percussive crack echoed, like a shot. Yellow stared numbly through the hole in the wall that she had created as her chest heaved, teeth audibly grinding. She sucked in her breath as if she was going to say something, but it left her as a growl, inarticulate in her chokehold on her emotions.

Perhaps once upon a time Blue would have flinched from that display of outrageous physicality, of bodily rage, the strength and power that had always been intimidatingly Yellow’s. But she had no energy to muster that now, and instead saw, with the greyish hindsight of age, that Yellow had turned away to vent her anger, so that Blue wouldn’t have to see the expression on her face. Covering, until the last, to make herself and the world palatable for Blue.

She hadn’t done the same for the zircons. A zircon was nothing to a Diamond, but truth should have been everything. Hadn’t it been Yellow who lectured her on the duty they had to fair leadership? Her hypocrisy was glaring in the face of her flawless self-sacrifice. For the first time, Blue wondered if Yellow had ever stopped working long enough to think about Pink. Yellow never brought her up unless Blue did, made all the right noises and then changed the subject back to what she wanted Blue to do as soon as possible. It made Blue feel slighted and ignored, like her feelings were worthless, as if Yellow was violently uncomfortable at the thought of simply engaging Blue in emotional intercourse, the sharing and reading of each other that had once been so natural.

Maybe that was why. It had been so natural that Blue had never learnt how to talk to Yellow. She’d never needed to. She’d always simply _known._

Perhaps it would have been easy once, to apologise. It wasn’t any more. The words felt like spitting fishhooks, catching and clawing at her insides. Even then, it was roundabout. “That was a pointless question.” She offered the words grudgingly, feeling anger still drip from each pointed syllable. It was a pointless question to ask now, without the clarity that her objective zircon had provided, serving her function, _doing her job._

“Was it?” Yellow barked humourlessly. She turned now, her eyes in shadow from the severity of her scowl, something distraught in the twist of her lip. It was emotional, bleak, if anything, a little lost, but angry. _No,_ thought Blue, immediately, _lost_ was the wrong word. Detached. Removed. As if the light was so far gone that Yellow had stopped looking for it.

“Are you satisfied, now, Blue?” Yellow’s words had the weight of hammer blows, but were as cold and sharp as knives.

“Of course not!” Blue hissed, and the earlier seethe of anger came back to her. With difficulty, she tried to swallow the poison before it emerged. She failed. She was Diamond – this was their battleground, their kiss, words and debate and power-struggles turned toxic. “ _You –_ ruined it!”

“It was already a ruin,” Yellow said coldly, condescension dripping. “None of it matters. Rose Quartz did it – we’ll catch and destroy her. The geoweapon will destroy Earth. It will all be over with. We can put it aside, and focus on what needs to be done.”

“But what if she didn’t? What if we had the wrong gem all this time? Don’t you want to know what happened?” Blue argued. These were the questions that had burnt and brimmed inside her, written herself behind her eyelids and seared into her skin, until every blink hurt and bled with tears. _Why? Why Pink? Why did this have to happen – to me?_

“I know what happened!” Yellow snarled, prickly, defensive, belied by the almost wild look in her eyes.

Yellow’s composure had cracked. Blue saw it, at least she could still do this, the fault lines of exhaustion and doubt and fear running through her like impurities, like the crazed webs of cracked glass, pushed and pushed with the weight of their churning empire on her gemstone until she was ready to collapse. Yellow couldn’t accept doubt, because doubt would force the overwhelming weight of everything she had tried to deny for the last five thousand years roar to the surface. But Blue’s questions had infected her with it, and Yellow was snapping, slowly, surely. She had failed to secure closure, to secure Rose’s trial for Blue, to ease Blue’s grief. Yellow had failed, and Blue had let her do it.

Blue did what she always did, she ran away.

Blue couldn’t bear more guilt, so she turned her head away and tried to forget that she had seen it. Yellow didn’t respond. Yellow was doing what she always did, stopgapped, plastered over the cracks, repainted the mask so that Blue wouldn’t have to.

Silence was swift and sudden, bridled with tension. It was all wrong. It had all gone wrong, long before Pink had been shattered, a sour note had been played, and somehow they’d forgotten how to love each other. And yet Yellow had still returned for Blue to heap recrimination and abuse on her.

The wall groaned. Neither of them looked, but alarms were blaring somewhere, panicky with structural instability. Of course. Yellow was too efficient, even in senseless destruction, to not somehow pick the one wall that held the damn building up.

Blue wanted to touch Yellow so desperately. She wanted to unbend the stiff neck so that heavy head with the weight of her incredible, powerful, unstoppable mind could rest on Blue’s shoulder, so Blue could smooth the stress-tension out of her shoulders, have Yellow relax against her the way she used to. It was a brittle desire. Blue was too fractured to support anything like Yellow. Yellow had always been the strong one, the one willing to do what needed to be done, the one willing to sacrifice. Hadn’t intimacy with Blue been the first thing she had sacrificed, to be a better diamond?

It wasn’t love, anymore. If it still was, it was of the worst kind, the kind that endured, past sweetness or tenderness, into the bitter, cold end days that crept along in the hearts of uncertainty and sleepless stress. They’d tied themselves into a Gordian knot from the beginning, naïve, whispering promises of forever, and here they were halfway through forever praying for the end if only for a moment to remember how it used to feel.

Blue was too angry to apologise. She had her own guilt to not confront, her own emotions to wall away – she’d spent five thousand years loving Pink more than she had the one who stood next to her, because Pink’s memory, at the very least, didn’t try to stir her from her entrenchment, the veil that had grown over her face and stayed there.

Neither said anything and the silence stretched, long and taut. Yellow was still tensed, waiting for Blue’s denial, but suddenly Blue was too tired to muster the feelings any longer. It didn’t seem to matter. What was one more petty argument unresolved? It’d take forever to pull them apart. Yellow would come back. She always did. And Blue would be there to recognise her, to pierce that ugly shell, as she always was.

If there was anything Blue could rely on, it was Yellow’s persistence, no matter how much they argued or the distance between them. It would be enough. They were Diamond, the last of their kind. All they had was each other against the world, forever.


End file.
